arranging and ordering minutely and precisely everything around him. Engineering, especially the construction of defenses, was Nicholas's other enduring passion. Even as a child 'whenever he built a summer house, for his nurse or his governess, out of chairs, earth, or toys, he never forgot to fortify it with guns - for protection.' Later, specializing in fortresses, he became head of the army corps of engineers and thus the chief military engineer of his country, perhaps his most important assignment during the reign of his brother; still later, as emperor, he staked all on making the entire land an impregnable fortress.
Nicholas's views fitted his personality to perfection. Born in 1796 and nineteen years younger than Alexander, the new ruler was brought up, not in the atmosphere of the late Enlightenment like his brother, but in that of wars against Napoleon and of reaction. Moreover, Nicholas married a Prussian princess and established particularly close ties with his wife's
family, including his father-in-law King Frederick William III and his brother-in-law King Frederick William IV who ruled Prussia in succession. The Russian wing of European reaction, represented by Nicholas I and his government, found its ideological expression in the doctrine of so-called 'Official Nationality,' Formally proclaimed in 1833 by Count Serge Uvarov, the tsar's minister of education, Official Nationality contained three principles: Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Autocracy meant the affirmation and maintenance of the absolute power of the sovereign, which was considered the indispensable foundation of the Russian state. Orthodoxy referred to the official Church and its important role in Russia, but also to the ultimate source of ethics and ideals that gave meaning to human life and society. Nationality -
The Decembrist rebellion at the beginning of Nicholas I's reign only hardened the new emperor's basic views as well as his determination to fight revolution to the end. No doubt it also contributed to the emperor's mistrust of the gentry, and indeed of independence and initiative on the part of any of his subjects. Characteristically, Nicholas I showed minute personal interest in the arrest, investigation, trial, and punishment of the Decembrists, and this preoccupation with the dangers of subversion remained with him throughout his reign. The new regime became preeminently one of militarism and bureaucracy. The emperor surrounded himself with military men to the extent that in the later part of his reign there were almost no civilians among his immediate assistants. Also, he relied heavily on special emissaries, most of them generals of his suite, who were sent all over Russia on particular assignments, to execute immediately the will of the sovereign. Operating outside the regular administrative system, they represented an extension, so to speak, of the monarch's own person. In fact, the entire machinery of government came to be permeated by the military spirit of direct orders, absolute obedience, and precision, at least as far as official reports and appearances were concerned. Corrup-
tion and confusion, however, lay immediately behind this facade of discipline and smooth functioning.
In his conduct of state affairs Nicholas I often bypassed regular channels, and he generally resented formal deliberation, consultation, or other procedural delay. The importance of the Committee of Ministers, the State Council, and the Senate decreased in the course of his reign. Instead of making full use of them, the emperor depended more and more on special bureaucratic devices meant to carry out his intentions promptly while remaining under his immediate and complete control. As one favorite method, Nicholas I made extensive use of
The first, and in many ways the most significant, of Nicholas's committees was that established on December 6, 1826, and lasting until 1832. Count Kochubey served as its chairman, and the committee contained five other leading statesmen of the period. In contrast to the restricted assignments of later committees, the Committee of the Sixth of December had to examine the state papers and projects left by Alexander, to reconsider virtually all major aspects of government and social organization in Russia, and to propose improvements. The painstaking work of this select group of officials led to negligible results: entirely conservative in outlook, the committee directed its effort toward hair-splitting distinctions and minor, at times merely verbal, modifications; and it drastically qualified virtually every suggested change. Even its innocuous 'law concerning the estates' that received imperial approval was shelved after criticism by Grand Duke Constantine. This laborious futility became the characteristic pattern of most of the subsequent committees during the reign of Nicholas I, in spite of the fact that the emperor himself often took an active part in their proceedings. The failure of one committee to perform its task merely led to the formation of another. For example, some nine committees in the reign of Nicholas tried to deal with the issue of serfdom.
His Majesty's Own Chancery proved to be more effective than the special committees. Organized originally as a bureau to deal with matters that demanded the sovereign's personal participation and to supervise the execution of the emperor's orders, the Chancery grew rapidly in the reign of Nicholas I. As early as 1826, two new departments were added to it: the Second Department was concerned with the codification of law, and the Third with the administration of the newly created corps of gendarmes. In 1828 the Fourth Department was created for the purpose of managing
the charitable and educational institutions under the jurisdiction of the Empress Dowager Mary. Eight years later the Fifth Department was created and charged with reforming the condition of the state peasants; after two years of activity it was replaced by the new Ministry of State Domains. Finally, in 1843, the Sixth Department of His Majesty's Own Chancery came into being, a temporary agency assigned the task of drawing up an administrative plan for Transcaucasia. The departments of the Chancery served Nicholas I as a major means of conducting a personal policy which bypassed the regular state channels.
The Third Department of His Majesty's Own Chancery, the political police - which came to symbolize to many Russians the reign of Nicholas I - acted as the autocrat's main weapon against subversion and revolution and as his principal agency for controlling the behavior of his subjects and for distributing punishments and rewards among them. Its assigned fields of activity ranged from 'all orders and all reports in every case belonging to the higher police' to 'reports about all occurrences without exception'! The new guardians of the state, dressed in sky-blue uniforms, were incessantly active:
In their effort to embrace the entire life of the people, they intervened actually in every matter in which it was possible to intervene. Family life, commercial transactions, personal quarrels, projects of inventions, escapes of novices from monasteries - everything interested the secret police. At the same time the Third Department received a tremendous number of petitions, complaints, denunciations, and each one resulted in an investigation, each one became a separate case.
The Third Department also prepared detailed, interesting, and remarkably candid reports of all sorts for the emperor, supervised literature - an activity ranging from minute control over Pushkin to ordering various 'inspired' articles in defense of Russia and the existing system - and fought every trace of revolutionary infection. The two successive heads of the Third Department, Count Alexander Benckendorff and Prince Alexis Orlov, probably spent more time with Nicholas I than any of his other assistants; they accompanied him, for instance, on his repeated trips of inspection throughout Russia. Yet most of the feverish activity of the gendarmes seemed to be to no purpose. Endless investigations of subversion, stimulated by the monarch's own suspiciousness, revealed very little. Even the most important radical group uncovered during the reign, the Petrashevtsy, fell victim not to the gendarmery but to its great rival, the ordinary police, which continued to be part of the Ministry of the Interior. Short on achievements, the Third Department proved to be long on failings. The gendarmes constantly expanded their pointless work to increase their importance, quarreled with other government agencies,
